Digital document authoring, editing, and publishing applications (hereafter collectively referred to as content processing or digital content processing applications) provide authors, editors, publication designers, and other users with the necessary tools to create and edit structured electronic documents. Examples of such content processing applications include iBooks Author®, Pages®, and Keynote®, all licensed by Apple Inc. Content processing applications give users the ability to produce documents that include a variety of media content items such as text, image, video, and audio content items. A wide range of graphical text elements are provided by these content processing applications, including characters, accents, diacritical marks, and other symbols. Furthermore, such content processing applications allow users to display these graphical text elements in a variety of typeface designs and font styles. For example, a content processing application may provide the characters and diacritical marks of an alphabet in both serif and sans serif typefaces and in both regular and italic font styles.
Many content processing applications, however, appear to misalign symbols associated with a character when the character is displayed in a font style having an angle (e.g., italics, oblique). For example, an overbar centered above an italicized character having a long descending stem or tail (e.g., ‘y’) may appear conspicuously out of alignment with the slanted appearance of the character. FIG. 1 illustrates a prior art example of a symbol 110 that is misaligned above a character 105. As shown, the symbol 110 is displayed too far to the left with respect to the character 105. The symbol 110 is misaligned with the character 105 because the alignment centers the symbol 110 based on the full width of the character 105, which is from the left-most point of the character to the right-most point of the character.